MILWAUKEE
- Do you think about the food at the end of your fork?
Where it came from? Who took part in growing, raising or
preparing it?

The
Milwaukee Public Museum’s latest exhibit shows what it
took to make your food in the “Global Kitchen: Food,
Nature, Culture.”

You
might even have gone organic and vegan, but those
workers growing your sustenance are still part of a food
industry that employs more than 1 billion worker serving
the 7.5 billion people on the planet.

“Food
affects everyone on the planet,”local exhibit curator Martha Davis Kipcak said in
a release. “We all eat. That’s why this exhibit is
so important. And more than just important, it’s also
a fun and interactive way to understand how food both
sustains our bodies and perpetuates our culture.Meals are the places where families meet,
business is conducted and where our senses are
stimulated.”

While
packed with numbers - like the average American will eat
28 pigs in a lifetime - the exhibit also is hands-on. Or
nose-on when it comes to the smelling stations with
scents such as fennel, lavender and lemon.

An
interactive cooking table allows visitor to make
well-known dishes from around the world.

A
big part of the New York-based American Museum of
Natural History touring exhibit is food’s global scope
and impact. It looks at how dishes have evolved,
including Korean kimchi with its sauerkraut fermenting
in glass jars buried into the earth to the tantalizing
aroma of Moroccan tagine.

It
explores the biology of taste and the complexities of
flavor. Taste tests with local farmers, chefs and
nutritionists turn it into a tongue-on demonstration.
Meijer is sponsoring a demonstration kitchen that
changes every two weeks.

Getting
it to a market remains a large part of the food puzzle.
Food Ships is an interactive game that shows the
challenges of transporting items like bananas, apples
and tuna globally.

“Global
Kitchen” also goes back in time, featuring a
re-creation of a 16th-century Aztec marketplace.

During
the exhibit that began this month and runs through July
19, visitors can also look forward to:

-Discovering what a week’s worth of groceries
includes for families from 16 different countries.

-
Exploring common breakfast foods from around the world,
from Greek pancakes to Colombian changua soup.

-
Sitting at the tables of some illustrious individuals
throughout history, including Empress Livia of Rome,
Mongolian ruler Kublai Khan and author Jane Austen.

“This
is more than an exhibit,” Davis Kipcak said. “It’s
a cultural experience that connects us to the rest of
the world using our most common thread: food.”

The
exhibit looks at the role food plays in culture, from
colorful Ukrainian Easter eggs to sugar skulls in
Mexico’s Day of the Dead. The importance of feasts,
such as Chinese New Year and Oktoberfest, is examined.

It
also explores what happens when we’re done with our
food. A waste sculpture contains the amount of food the
average U.S. family of four wastes annually - 1,656
pounds - which leaves plenty of food for thought.